Episode 515 – Build your own SAN, PSP Hacking, Net Grep

Jenn Cutter of Open Alpha fame joins us to talk about recent developments in PSP hacking and homebrew. Matt’s got answers to your questions about rolling your own Storage Area Network for all your virtualization needs, and Darren’s filtering packets in the console with ngrep.

The PSP homebrew scene has grown more interesting over the past little while since the user base has been sectioned off into different camps based on the particular unit they purchased and whatever firmware they are using. Thanks to the efforts of Team Typhoon, ChickHEN (homebrew enabler) permits owners of all models to run the unofficial apps and games they’ve grown to love without touching the flash of the PSP, so there’s no worrying about turning it into a brick. No one likes expensive bricks. Keep in mind that ChickHEN is not a piracy tool so don’t expect to run any type of backups though it. Davee has the lowdown on the latest release which can be downloaded here. If you are curious or sceptical, feel free to check out video proof that it works on PSP 3000s.

32 Comments

Good episode…I am really digging Matt’s segments lately about ESX and now SANs…all the crap that I’m a high level network admin needs to know.

As for iSCSI…I like it, and the fact that you can get 10GigE switches and cards now is great…but you are still forced to share bandwidth for port groups. So sure, while you may have 10Gig per port, you’re still sharing that across maybe 8 ports (or however big your port group is) and then across the backplane of the switch. With FC, you have 4GB or 8GB dedicated. Might not make that huge of a difference for most people, but when you get to a SAN that really gets beat up and serves out a ton of data, it starts adding up.

I’m loving Matt’s segments on more of the corporate infrastructure. I’d love to get more of this. My only request is for him to stop ending sentences with “blah, blah, blah” because at that point I pretty much have to stop listening.

I was wondering if when you talk about the SAN/NAS solutions if you could talk about ZFS. Is this a real option of the non-*nix head? The only easy solution I’ve seen is FreeNAS 0.7 (pre-release) but I like OpenSolaris’s Time Slider option. I hadn’t found anything that will allow you a change by change snapshot even though the file system appears able.

Cool show… that tankcam thing by the way is using the streaming MJPEG format built into his Panasonic camera. If you’re using Interweb Exploder, you have to install an ActiveX control to get it to work. So… it’s not flash. They’re just loading a special image into an image input and, in another place (the mobile version) into a normal image (since that page was custom developed, I guess). Very cool — learning something new every episode!

All you have to do is have your Net Admin mirror monitor your corporate uplink and direct that right into your VMware ESX host. Now you have plenty of traffic to test all your new toys with on any platform you want(linux preferred, MAC not included). What the hell, throw up 20 virtuals all monitoring your outbound traffic just for fun. Assuming you’re a security analyst of course.

Wondering when we can get a hardware list so that we can start the build on the SAN – Very interested in building one as I have a couple clients who desperately need to have one and there are no “how to’s” that I’ve found to get down to the nuts and bolts of building and deploying one. Interested in how much $$ and how to.

You mentioned in the show that you had a good site to help you build your own VMware ESXi whiteboxes that fit within VMware’s HCL. Would you mind sharing the site? I really need to upgrade my ESXi box here at my home office and some pre-configured server hardware suggestions would save some time!

Here’s some sites that I’ve found so far that might also be helpful to someone else.

I see that you have brought up packet filtering ext and what you can pull out of a pcap or sniffed traffic. i haven’t been able to get this tool working but it seems to be able to extract or sniff msn messenger video and text cat

what site/vendor was matt using to configure/buy the hardware in the roll your own section of the SAN discussion. I am looking for an inexpensive san solution for multiple sites and so far the Dell quotes are way higher than the 2K, 3K, numbers on this eppisode.

Anyone here have experiance with SANMelody? I’d like to know a little more about that, especially the replication.

I was surprised that ATA over Ethernet was not discussed during the brief SAN segment. You should check out http://www.coraid.com/ for information on their etherdrive boxes. They now support VMWare ESX. You can even test drive it by using the AoE modules (and tools) that ship with Linux kernels (used to be the case, anyway).

I am a little behind, but I am watching this episode today, and I was a little surprised at the lack of differentiation that Matt had between SAN and NAS. For most people, the difference doesn’t matter, but it is subtle and can be important.

A NAS is a network-available filesystem. Like NFS, you can mount the filesystem and you access the files on the remote disk. In Unix/Linux terminology, we are taking advantage of file-level access to the data.

A SAN is specifically designed to look like an attached disk to the various utilities acting upon it. SAN is giving you block-level access much the same way that a locally attached hard drive appears.

“Serverankur says:
August 26, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Please, is it possible to get some videos based on training in SAN Administration. eg timefinder, SRDF, Powerpath installation n maintainence and Symmetrix Arrays…differences in Models…
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